1. Cytaty
  2. Autorzy
  3. Charles Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills cytaty

Charles Wright Mills – socjolog amerykański.

✵ 28. Sierpień 1916 – 20. Marzec 1962
Charles Wright Mills Fotografia
Charles Wright Mills: 57   Cytatów 0   Polubień

Charles Wright Mills cytaty

„Fulgencio Batista zagarnął w 1933 władzę nad armią, przy której pomocy objął rządy nad Kubą. Wasz [amerykański] rząd uznał go omal że natychmiast za przedstawiciela legalnego rządu kubańskiego… Batista rządził nami, mając za sobą całą potęgę armii, przez dziesięć lat. (…) rozpoczął krwawą łaźnię.(…) kat ten wraz ze swymi siepaczami, szkolonymi przez amerykańskie misje wojskowe, zdążył wymordować około 20 tysięcy Kubańczyków, przy czym posługiwał się bronią, samolotami i czołgami, których dostarczał wasz rząd… Rząd Eisenhowera sprzedawał temu gangsterskiemu dyktatorowi bomby i samoloty wojenne, karabiny i kule. Nazywało się to zawsze obroną zachodniej półkuli…”

Charles Wright Mills

akt oskarżenia w imieniu Kuby.
Źródło: Grzegorz Jaszuński, Świat zdaje egzamin. 1945–1965, Wyd. Czytelnik, Warszawa, 1967, s. 326.

O świecie , O pomocy

„My, ludzie z Ameryki Łacińskiej, umieramy przeciętnie w wieku lat 35; wy żyjecie ponad 65 lat. Czy masy niepiśmiennych, głodnych i dręczonych chorobami chłopów z Boliwii, Haiti czy Wenezueli, wczoraj zaś jeszcze i z Kuby są częścią tej samej „zachodniej cywilizacji” co i wy? Jakaż to cywilizacja, w której mogą dziać się podobne rzeczy?… Ustalamy to raz na zawsze: należymy do ludów głodnego świata. Czy ludy te zamieszkują Afrykę i Azję, czy Amerykę Łacińską, nie czyni to zbyt wielkiej różnicy… Śmierć poniesiona w 35 roku życia w Ameryce Środkowej w czasie pracy dla koncernu owocowego nie różni się tak bardzo od śmierci poniesionej w Afryce Południowej w czasie pracy w kopalni diamentów… Brak zaś umiejętności czytania jest takim samym brakiem w każdym języku… Prawie połowa nas, mieszkańców Ameryki Łacińskiej to takie właśnie prymitywne stworzenia – jesteśmy niepiśmienni.”

Charles Wright Mills

Źródło: Słuchajcie, Jankesi, cyt. za: Grzegorz Jaszuński, Świat..., s. 318.

O śmierci , O ludziach , O świecie , O chorobach

Charles Wright Mills: Cytaty po angielsku

“America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

"Structure of Power in America", The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 9 (March 1958).
1950s

“The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

Źródło: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), p. 185.

“What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that the economy has become concentrated and incorporated in the great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center… in the political sphere… the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

Źródło: The Power Elite (1956), P. 242, describing the view commonly held in the eighteenth century.

“The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated… The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered… The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

Źródło: The Power Elite (1956), p. 7; discussing sectors of society which Mills feels have only recently become the dominant factors in determining the ultimate course of society.

“The family provides the army and navy with the best men and boys that it possesses. And, as we have seen, education and science too are becoming means to the ends sought by the military.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Sociological Imagination

Źródło: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 31, commenting on the verbosity of the chief work of competing sociologist Talcott Parsons.

“Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its "inevitability," want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

The Causes of World War Three (1960)

“In a society of employees dominated by the marketing mentality, it is inevitable that a personality market should arise. For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of 'handling', selling and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

“Religion, virtually without fail, provides the army at war with its blessings, and recruits from among its officials the chaplain, who in military costume counsels and consoles and stiffens the morale of men at war.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. … The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

"Liberal Values in the Modern World," in Power , Politics and People (1963), p. 189.
1960s

“Every revolution has its counterrevolution — that is a sign the revolution is for real. And every revolution must defend itself against this counterrevolution, or the revolution will fail.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

Listen Yankee (1960), pp. 54.
1960s

“Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues — and in terms of the problems of history making.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Sociological Imagination

Appendix: "On Intellectual Craftsmanship"
The Sociological Imagination (1959)

“To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

The New Men of Power (1948).
1940s

“Kindness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale of something. With anonymous insincerity, the Successful Person thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

“The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways, and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to. Still, it is conformed to as part of one; s job and one's style of life, but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself and is estranged from it also.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

“Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Sociological Imagination

Źródło: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 174.

“But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace is no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war or an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord……In other words 'the morale of the State Department is so broken that its finest men flee from it, and advise others to flee.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

Mills was invited to speak in the Soviet Union as an honored guest, due to his criticisms of economies in the West; he was asked to make a toast at a banquet, and in his contrarian way, toasted Trotsky, whose works had been banned in the Soviet Union by Stalin. Reported in Saul Landau, "C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months", Ramparts (August 1965), p. 49-50.
1960s

“Without an industrial economy, the modern army, as in America, could not exist; it is an army of machines. Professional economists usually consider military institutions as parasitic upon the means of production. Now, however, such institutions have come to shape much of the economic life of the United States.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

Źródło: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

“In a public, as we may understand the term, (1) virtually as many people express opinions as receive them, (2) Public communications are so organised that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion (3) readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against – if necessary – the prevailing system of authority. And (4) authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations.-In a mass, (1) far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media. (2) The communications that prevail are so organised that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect. (3) The realisation of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organise and control the channels of such action. (4) The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorised institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

Źródło: The Power Elite (1956), p. 5.

“We know well that all new cultural beginnings today must be part of world culture; that no truly intellectual life can occur if the mind is restricted; that no art can have genuine and everlasting value if it is not in a universal language. East and West. God knows there is enough restriction. Enough laziness of stereotypes. Smash them, we say to ourselves. And the only way to do that is to open up a true world forum that is absolutely free.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

Listen Yankee (1960), pp. 144-145.
1960s

“People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

Źródło: The Power Elite (1956), p. 14.

“In the United States… a handful of corporations centralize decisions and responsibilities that are relevant for military and political as well as economic developments of global significance. For nowadays the military and the political cannot be separated from economic considerations of power. We now live not in an economic order or a political order, but in a political economy that is closely linked with military institutions and decisions. This is obvious in the repeated "oil crisis" in the Middle East, or in the relevance of Southeast Asia and African resources for the Western powers…”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills

Character & Social Structure (1954).
1950s

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

“If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Marxists

Foreword, The Marxists (1962).
1960s

“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”

Help us translate this quote
C. Wright Mills książka The Power Elite

Źródło: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.

Podobni autorzy

Zygmunt Bauman Fotografia
Zygmunt Bauman 58
polski socjolog, filozof, eseista
Erich Fromm Fotografia
Erich Fromm 66
amerykański filozof, psycholog i psychoanalityk
Robert A. Heinlein Fotografia
Robert A. Heinlein 11
pisarz amerykański, klasyk amerykańskiej fantastyki naukowej
Henry Miller Fotografia
Henry Miller 16
pisarz amerykański
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk Fotografia
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk 23
prezydent Czechosłowacji (1918–1935)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald Fotografia
Francis Scott Fitzgerald 33
amerykański pisarz
Isaac Asimov Fotografia
Isaac Asimov 19
amerykański pisarz
Sylvester Stallone Fotografia
Sylvester Stallone 9
aktor amerykański
Robert Frost Fotografia
Robert Frost 13
poeta amerykański
Jerome David Salinger Fotografia
Jerome David Salinger 9
pisarz amerykański